Leilani Battle

Leilani Marie Battle is an African American computer scientist. She is an assistant professor at University of Washington's Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. Leilani Battle is also a co-director in UW's interactive Data Lab program. She is known for her research into the visualization and analysis of complex database systems.

Early life and education Battle grew up with a love for video games. Because of this she originally chose computer science to become a game designer or a developer. Battle then went to University of Washington and earned her B.S. in computer engineering in 2011. During her time with MIT and her Ph.D. work, she also helped create ForeCache, a general-purpose program to create time-efficient tools for visualizing large data-sets that interact with Database Management Systems. In 2020, MIT Technology Review lists ForeCache as one of her major contributions when awarding her Innovators Under 35.

Awards

In 2020, the MIT Technology Review named Battle one of Innovators Under 35. She won an Adobe Data Science Research Award in 2019 and a VMware Early Career Faculty Grant in 2021. She earned the ORAU Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award for her project, “Supporting Interactive Data Exploration at Scale”, in 2019.

She also received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award

In 2022, Battle received the TCDE Rising Star Award.